Bruce Barnbaum - The Art of Photography - An Approach to Personal Expression

Fifth, though I was swamped (and under the gun) with work at home, I put it all aside for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. None of the important work that I put aside constituted an emergency (though it often seems that way at the time, doesn’t it?), so I seized the opportunity. As it turned out, had I decided to wait, the ice crystals would have been a memory rather than a photograph (or, in this case, a series of photographs). The compelling desire was there, and I jumped.

Finally, my working procedure on this project was radically different from my normal approach. Normally I have a clear idea about the final image as I stand behind the camera. That’s previsualization. With these images, however, I’m leaving the final prints open to further consideration. Why? Because everything about them is still quite new to me: the subject matter, the camera, the extreme macro, the working procedure, and even the final processing (after all, my digital background can’t compete with my 40+ years of shooting with a 4 × 5 or my 40+ years of black-and-white darkroom experience). For all these reasons, I’m keeping an open mind. In time, I’ll develop a better handle on it from the start—as you will in your own development.

My excited response to the ice shards on a picnic table proved that I still have the basic ingredients for creativity: enthusiasm, curiosity, and a mix of seriousness and fun. I followed that up with action. As I write this, I’m excited about this foray into something decidedly new and different. I’ll leave it up to the reader to judge whether the images offer a start toward exceptional work, meritorious work, or just mediocre work (hopefully it’s not really bad work). But the imagery is still in the beginning stages, and the possibilities are endless. If I’m still involved in such endeavors, maybe it’s an indication that I’m still in my prime.

You’re still in your prime (or maybe reaching your prime) if your enthusiasm is high, if your mind is open to all possibilities, and if you’re actively noticing, thinking about, and pursuing new, different, and interesting ideas. You have to be actively involved and interested. And you must have a connection between yourself and the subject matter; it can’t be new but meaningless.

Always keep this in mind: The photographic process starts with discovery accompanied by imagination. While a painter has the option of putting anything on a blank canvas, a photographer has to point the camera toward something, or start with a scan of something. But it doesn’t end there; your imagination has to turn the “found object” into something of interest and importance, something more than just an object. Minor White truly had it right when he said, “We photograph something for what it is and what else it is” (quoted several times in this book, but with no apologies). You’ll know that “something else” when you find it. And I have more to say about that in the next chapter.

Chapter 17. Approaching Creativity Intuitively

SOMETIMES IT SEEMS TO ME that photographers are the most hesitant, intensely careful people on earth. So many are unwilling to proceed with anything new or different unless and until they can identify every step along the way. They seem almost terrified to try something new for fear that it may fail. I have seen this syndrome for years among workshop students, hidden within questions I’m asked at lectures or gallery openings, or in casual discussions with both amateur and professional photographers. We can all get caught in such hang-ups, myself included, although I consciously try to avoid that type of hesitancy.

All of us want to be successful. All of us want to avoid failure. (These are two different things, so the previous sentences are not redundant.) But I suggest that if you want to know every result before you plunge ahead, you can’t achieve an “aha!” moment that lifts you from the banality of everyday plodding (i.e., neither success nor failure, but just getting by) to something much more exciting, enlivening, and satisfying. The possibility of abject failure is the price you must be willing to pay for trying something new, something different, something removed from your normal procedures. (Initially this may appear to be contradictory to thoughts on previsualization in the early chapters, but it isn’t. Read on.)

Too many photographers throw away their intuition and resort to an approach that they perceive as scientific. They move forward carefully, testing everything along the way, trying to get a complete handle on the characteristics of everything they use under every possible condition: the exact speed of the film, the exact development of the film with each potential developer, the exact time and temperature for development, and the exact agitation procedure. Then they do the same with papers and developers, asking further questions about how the paper reacts to different contrast filtration (this assumes variable contrast papers and enlargers), the exact dilution of the developer, and how long the image should be developed. Digitally, they may want to know every possible Photoshop move before trying the first one. Worse yet, when they’re in the field, they’re too hesitant to make a photograph that’s decidedly different in subject matter or composition from what they’ve done before. Whew...it’s mind-boggling.

In the 1970s, I began photographing the boulder fields below Mt. Whitney known as the Alabama Hills. I was attracted to the seemingly inexhaustible piles of boulders, heaped on top of one another in endless varieties of forms. I made dozens—perhaps hundreds—of photographs of this bizarre area over the years, and I am still attracted to the weathered granite boulders that seem to be the remains of the creation of the earth .

Figure 17-1. Barnbaum: Boulders, Alabama Hills

My advice is to loosen up. Don’t plunge ahead foolishly by trying something with no knowledge or insight, but plunge ahead nonetheless. Get a few pointers about how to do things—say, a time/temperature table, a few key Photoshop moves, and the general characteristics of the products you’re using—and then proceed. Get some basic facts, a few understandings, a few tips along the way, and then experiment with what you know. Most of all, be willing to experiment with new tools, new subject matter, new ways of seeing and composing, new ways of interpreting the scene, and a new and different black-and-white or color palette.

Intuition in Science

It turns out that many great scientific advances did not proceed through methods that appear to be scientific. Rather, these advances were intuitive at the outset. Certainly this is true of two of the greatest advances in 20th century physics: Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity (actually two successive theories, the special theory of relativity and then, ten years later, the general theory of relativity, with the latter building upon and extending the former) and Richard Feynman’s theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED).

Einstein asked himself, “What would I see if I were traveling through space at the speed of light, or approaching the speed of light?” He proceeded with a series of thought experiments, ultimately arriving at his conclusions. Thus he used both intuition and existing scientific literature to build up his concepts and eventually his complete theory. But his initial thinking was purely intuitive, as were many of the insights along the way. Previous scientific discoveries—primarily Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism—were relied upon for the basic foundation and confirmation of his theory, but the original thinking was intuitive.